A Poem For You This Sunday

In case it hasn't been mentioned before, I am a grad student in a low-residency MFA program. My degree that I receive next July will be a Masters in Poetry. Twice a year (over New Years' and over July 4th) I go to 10-day residencies in Vermont. Throughout each semester, I work with an advisor, sending a packet containing a cover letter that discusses my reading, my struggles, and my thoughts about my work and writing in general, plus some critical work, and of course, poems. Over the past month I have had no trouble at all writing fairly decent first drafts for my packets. It's very exciting. I just sent one last Friday, and here is a poem from that packet.

Sea Star

I am having trouble articulating everything around my head
these days, swimming in the periphery, stroking the perimeter like a seasick
star, reflected. I’ve said this before: I am a bent spoke, otherwise
unspoken, an ancient slanting curse. Believe me! That
is all. My idea of love
is not my mother’s. Must it always
come back to our differences? I am cycling. There are
cyclones of debris and diagnoses pelting around the place
in the dark. The moon is not an angel mother. The moon is not
anything to me, the crooked wire star. Gales of associations
blow through. I am finding it hard to tell
how to stay glued to the surface, but tell me—Am I
in the water or the sky? I want to be peeled back
to a flower, but my points break
the skin of anyone who tries, the salt stings. I am plucked with pliers
from somewhere
and stuck down somewhere else. Everything is metallic midnight blue.

Don’t question the mindscape, question
the bending, the warp
that makes you think you
look alright. You are not all there is.

But tonight, or underwater, I am
the only one I can see. I don’t feel the light
bouncing back to me. At me would suffice. I want
to be touched by the still cold fusion
of lake reflected constellations. The water
that rinses clean rusts me, but I would grate softly
into nothingness to feel a touch of the elements,
know one
from another. I would rust for this.